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Monday, January 10, 2011

Strawberry Sour Cream Muffins

Well, you spoke and I answered. It seems a lot of you are interested in muffins and breads. So I'll start there, but I also have some cake, brownie and sweet treat recipes in mind. I spent much of my Saturday afternoon scouring my dessert recipes for things I love to make and some I haven't even tried yet.

Like these. I was flipping through my go-to muffin cookbook (Jean Childress' Country Kitchen Muffin Cookbook) to find a different recipe and these caught my eye. So I pulled out the muffin tin (er, muffin stone?) and here we are. These aren't very sweet and will get a lot of flavor from the jam you use. I chose strawberry preserves, but you could make these with anything--raspberry jam, apricot preserves, orange marmalade. I don't see why you couldn't use grape jelly if you were so inclined. The one change I would make to the ingredients would be to add a teaspoon of extract to punch up the flavor. The muffin looks light and airy, but is deceivingly dense, which was a surprise since I sifted the ingredients.

Divide half the batter among a greased 12 cup muffin tin. I used a medium cookie scoop, putting about one scoop of batter into each muffin cup. Shake the muffin tin gently to spread the batter into the pan--it's a stiff dough, so you may want to use a spatula to encourage the dough to fill each cup.

Place all ingredients in a small bowl and using a pastry blender, mix together by cutting in the butter. the result will be a crumbly mixture of butter bits. Sorry I don't have a picture--I spaced on this one. Which is unfortunate because I actually thought this made way too much topping, so I saved the remaining and used in on my banana bread recipe (yes, I'll share it with you!). So that means I forgot to take a picture of the bowl twice.